How-to

In this paper, I employ anonymous New York City yellow taxi records to
infer variation in interactions between insiders of the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York (New York Fed) and insiders of major commercial banks
around Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings. Taxi rides between
the vicinities of the New York Fed’s and the major commercial banks’
buildings serve as indicators of meetings at those institutions, and
coincidental drop-offs of passengers picked up around those institutions
serve as indicators of offsite meetings. Cieślak, Morse and
Vissing-Jørgensen (2016) posit systematic leakage from the Federal
Reserve around FOMC meetings along unofficial channels, and, in line
with that hypothesis, I find highly statistically significant evidence
of increases in meetings at the New York Fed late at night and in
offsite meetings during typical lunch hours.

Privacy

Let's begin this with a brief section on Cambridge Analytica & co. I finally
manage to gather some links that I think make a respectable job of summarizing
the entire thing in a proper way.

Conversely, if this psychographics business is so effective, why isn’t it
commonly used by smart e-commerce players like Amazon, or anyone else beyond
the brand advertisers who like keeping old marketing folklore alive?

One of the ironies of this most recent Facebook brouhaha is the differing
reactions between the digital marketing professionals who’ve spent a career
turning money into advertising pixels and a concerned public otherwise
innocent to the realities of digital advertising. Most ad insiders express
skepticism about Cambridge Analytica’s claims of having influenced the
election, and stress the real-world difficulty of changing anyone’s mind
about anything with mere Facebook ads, least of all deeply ingrained
political views.

The public, with no small help from the media sniffing a great story, is
ready to believe in the supernatural powers of a mostly unproven targeting
strategy. What they don’t realize is what every ads practitioner, including
no doubt Cambridge Analytica itself, knows subconsciously: in the ads world,
just because a product doesn’t work doesn’t mean you can’t sell it. Before
this most recent leak, and its subsquent ban on Facebook, Cambridge
Analytica was quite happy to sell its purported skills, no matter how
dubious they might really be.

The problem here goes beyond Cambridge Analytica and what it may have
done. What other apps were allowed to siphon data from millions of Facebook
users? What if one day Facebook decides to suspend from its site a
presidential campaign or a politician whose platform calls for things like
increased data privacy for individuals and limits on data retention and use?
What if it decides to share data with one political campaign and not
another? What if it gives better ad rates to candidates who align with its
own interests?

A business model based on vast data surveillance and charging clients to
opaquely target users based on this kind of extensive profiling will
inevitably be misused. The real problem is that billions of dollars are
being made at the expense of the health of our public sphere and our
politics, and crucial decisions are being made unilaterally, and without
recourse or accountability.

Facebook and Cambridge
Analytica.
Schneier doesn't comment on the alleged effectiveness of the Cambridge
Analytica systems, but makes a point that as of now everybody should have in
mind:

Surveillance capitalism drives much of the internet. It's behind most of
the "free" services, and many of the paid ones as well. Its goal is
psychological manipulation, in the form of personalized advertising to
persuade you to buy something or do something, like vote for a candidate.
And while the individualized profile-driven manipulation exposed by
Cambridge Analytica feels abhorrent, it's really no different from what
every company wants in the end. This is why all your personal information is
collected, and this is why it is so valuable. Companies that can understand
it can use it against you.

It's not only that you are the product, as gurus past their expiration
date like to claim. You're unpaid labor too.

Data brokers are entities that collect information about consumers, and
then sell that data (or analytic scores, or classifications made based on
that data) to other data brokers, companies, and/or individuals. These data
brokers do not have a direct relationship with the people they're collecting
data on, so most people aren't even aware that the data is even being
collected.

Emblematic of this unprecedented surveillance apparatus are the facial
recognition devices deployed in Shenzhen last April that are meant to deter
jaywalkers. These devices take photos of offenders and display them on large
LED screens above the intersection, along with their name and part of their
government ID number. (There is also a website showing photos and information
for jaywalkers in Shenzhen.)

Tech

In the hopes of deterring violence, schools are turning to big data
analytics to examine social media posts for the earliest signs of
violence—depression, resentment, and isolation. Shawsheen Valley Technical
High School in Massachusetts has turned to Social Sentinel, a data analytics
company that says it can use the type of threat detection police agencies
use to identify students at risk. But experts worry student social media
mining, even with the best intentions, is a slippery slope to treating
students the way we treat suspects.